


Stories About My Wizards

by Syntax



Series: Stories About My D&D Characters [3]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Anthology, Cyborgs, Drow Culture, Gen, Homebrew Content, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Loneliness, Marriage, Moving Out, Running Away
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:15:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26784274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syntax/pseuds/Syntax
Summary: Sometimes you create the perfect character and then can't find a game to play them in. So naturally, the next best thing to do is write fanfiction about them.Chapter 1: Tammy Fey, High Elf School of Evocation WizardChapter 2: Adfaer Adela/Dovev, Drow School of Abjuration WizardChapter 3: Patch Javelin, Mechanatrix School of Invention Wizard
Series: Stories About My D&D Characters [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1832869
Kudos: 2





	1. School of Evocation

The marble tiles in the parlor had been polished until they shined even in the lowest of light. Fresh flowers from the garden had been picked and placed in numerous vases, all expertly arranged in accordance to style and shape and color and meaning. The silverware was buffed, the glasses were sparkling, the porcelain plates and dishes cleaner than a saintly soul. A dinner fit for a king—roast boar with apples and pears, flocked by various salads and side dishes and finished with wine—sat expertly placed upon an immaculate dining table.

And her husband was not there to enjoy it with her.

Tamika ( _"Darling, just call me Tammy, everyone does," she'd once told him, before they were wed_ ) sat alone at the dining table, prim and proper in the chair just next to the head. The dress she wore was one of her dear husband's favorites, though it had been months since he'd last seen it. It had been months since he'd last seen _her_ too, but that was neither here nor there. She poured herself a glass of wine, served herself a cut of boar and a smattering of salad, and she ate alone in the dining room with neither conversation nor concert as had long since become her custom.

It was hardly worth bringing a minstrel into the dining room to amuse just one person while they ate, after all, and she couldn't exactly throw dinner parties every night. Even beyond the danger of simply running out of things to talk about with her dearest friends, as wealthy as she and her husband were, the sheer amount of food and manpower needed to supply such parties would surely drain their coffers within a year at best. No, Tamika had little issue with dining by her lonesome in the quiet.

She was a lady, after all. Ladies simply don't allow such things to ruffle their feathers. They have too much else to worry about to even care.

( _"Darling, don't worry, I'll take care of everything while you're gone," she'd said with a smile the day before he left_ )

The gardeners had informed her that last night's gale had killed a good number of her rose bushes and upended a few trees. A few windows had been broken. A few rugs had been lost to water damage. She'd need to find a horticulturalist to replace the lost bushes, a glazier to replace the windows, a whole host of weavers to construct new carpets... Likely it would also be prudent to hire the services of a druid or priest to ward the estate against similar disaster in the future.

Tamika swirled the wine in her glass thoughtfully.

One skilled with the right sorts of magic could likely revive the bushes with little effort. They could mend the windows and clean the rugs and ward the house and a whole host of other things. Fly. Teleport. Converse long distances. Locate anything she could think of. With the right spells she might even be able to...

She carved that thought into pieces along with the apples and boar and bid herself to think no more of it.

( _"Darling, surely they can't require your presence at all hours," she'd asked him after yet another lengthy stay away_ )

But, there were still other schools of magic. Her tutors had always told her she had the aptitude for a variety of fields. If not divination to locate her erstwhile husband or find out the truth of he matter behind his constant disappearances then...

Well, then there was always something deeply charming about unleashing a torrent of flame on something that annoyed you, wasn't there?

Tamika could ward the house and fill the halls with spectral servants, or change the interior decorations, or volunteer her services to organizations needing assistance with shaping landscapes or breaking curses or traveling to other planes or—

A carefully polished silver fork fell from her gloved hands, staining the embroidered tablecloth underneath it ever so slightly.

She could travel.

She could travel and adventure and enjoy herself and be back home in time to sign off on the month's groceries and tidy up whatever had collected dust in her absence. The servants hardly needed her daily direction, with just herself and ( _"Darling, I don't care if you've found someone else, just please come home—"_ ) no one else, there was hardly all that much to take care of. The laundry was mostly servant uniforms, the mending was mostly servant tools. Even the servants' dinners were just leftovers of her own feasts since there was hardly any point in making more food when she could hardly be expected to eat all that much of it herself.

The cooking and cleaning were her own tasks, little more than hobbies to fill her empty days. The servants could do both just fine without her. The servants could do just about everything themselves just fine without her.

Tamika wouldn't even have to leave the house while she was learning. There were plenty of empty rooms in the estate to practice spells in, plenty of old family friends well-versed in the arcane that would surely be happy to lend her a spellbook or two in exchange for a well-crafted mixed berry torte. She could...

She could do this. She could become a wizard. She could become _powerful._

( _"Darling—"_ )

And her husband likely wouldn't even notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tammy Fey holds the distinction of being one of only three characters of mine that could be made solely with the player's handbook. She's a High Elf Evocation Wizard who is also a housewife who took up adventuring as a hobby, and I love her very much.


	2. School of Abjuration

Adfaer Adela had heard few fleeting words about the goddess known as Eilistraee.

She was weak, a fool that sought to drag them all down with her, a tempter that would lead similarly weak drow away from the worship of Lolth. To speak her name without derision was to admit to her worship. To admit to her worship was to be put to death—or worse.

Adfaer could hardly risk even knowing her name. His mother had already tried to kill him once. The servants that raised him and his youngest sister together made sure to impress upon him that her hand was stayed only so that he might contribute to his sister's training as a szarkai. He was to be grateful to his sister, to his mother, to the servants that looked after him, for allowing him the opportunity to live when otherwise they had no reason to.

He didn't really feel grateful. He felt afraid. Mother didn't need an excuse to kill him back then. Mother didn't need an excuse now. But to know the name of the Dark Maiden—that would give her one.

Which made it all the more distressing that that name was coming from his sister's lips, not his own.

"Could you repeat some of that?" he said quietly, trying to lace his boots as quickly as possible after his sister had implored him to get dressed. "You said you had a dream, but I don't know what that has to do with me."

He was just the spare. He was nothing. He was a mediocre magic user, a pathetic politician, a horrific swordsman. He was the prop they used to teach Aoife how to pretend to have a heart and get used to being around children before they sent her to the surface to spy. Whether a weak and foolish god or not, Eilistraee was still a god—he couldn't fathom why she would have an interest in him.

Unless she thought he was weak too.

He saw Aoife shaking her head over by the dresser, pulling out long coats and thick trousers and stuffing them into a travel bag.

"I—Adfaer, you know how I'm leaving for the surface in a few days, right?" She asked him, still pulling things out of the dresser. After a few seconds she pulled out her jewelry box and dumped its contents into the bag too.

He nodded, unsure of where she was going with this. "Yeah. Mother's been talking about it a lot."

There was a choked sound from his sister that could have been either a laugh or a sob. "Oh, I bet she _fucking_ has. I bet she's ecstatic too. She'll have the house all to herself by then."

Adfaer frowned, but didn't say anything just yet. He pulled on his laces to double check that they were tight enough and set about tying up the next boot.

It didn't make sense though. Their older sisters had all left the house, sure, and Adfaer might not know where his father was but he knew for a fact that he'd never met the man. But that didn't mean that Mother would be alone in the house. Aoife was the only one leaving, there'd still be—

There'd still be him, without a sister to protect him from Mother.

Adfaer froze.

"...Aoife?", he said, trying and failing not to let the tremor building up in his tiny body escape into his words.

A pair of white arms wrapped around him from behind, pulling him into a tight hug. His breathing stilled. For a moment, he worried that the tremor had escaped him afterwards. Then he realized that the shaking he felt was coming from his sister behind him.

"I'm sorry," she said. Her voice sounded weirdly thick in a way Adfaer didn't understand. "I'm so sorry. I should have realized sooner. I should've—It shouldn't have taken a dream."

She turned him around in his seat. Adfaer's eyes widened—against the ghostly white of her skin he could see tears streaming down his sister's face.

"Adfaer, we're getting you out of here. I don't care what Mother has planned. Eilistraee has shown me the way, and I am not letting anything happen to you while I still have the power to stop it."

 _But why?_ he wanted to ask. He was nothing. He was less than nothing. He lived to further her training and if her training was complete then she didn't have any reason to keep him around. Attachments were weakness. All of this was weakness. Tears were weak, love was weak, Eilistraee was weak and she preyed on the weakest of the drow—

But his sister was not weak. Aoife was the strongest person Adfaer knew.

Stronger, perhaps, than Mother?

The thought felt treasonous in his mind.

Aoife pressed a bag into his hands, completely unaware of her brother's inner turmoil. Adfaer slung it over his shoulder's without hesitation. He didn't know why she was doing any of this, but he knew to follow orders.

"Come on," Aoife said, hoisting a bag of her own over layers of the thick traveling clothes that she was going to be sent up to the surface with. She walked past him as quietly as she could on her booted feet. Adfaer tried to follow her example. "Part of my training was learning the guard rotations and finding ways around them. We can gather more supplies on our way out, but we have to be quick about it. We only have a short window to move if we want to be a good distance away from the house before they notice we're gone. I—"

Aoife grabbed his hand and pulled him closer to her as they walked.

"May Eilistraee watch over us."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dovev (birth name Adfaer Adela) was a smol child wizard I concepted and played with a friend in a campaign that we ended up leaving. The original concept was a duo, a drider and the child-aged sibling they escaped the underdark with, which eventually became a duo of a szarkai paladin and the baby wizard sibling they escaped with at the urgings of Eilistraee.
> 
> One additional note though, Dovev's sibling Morana (Aoife Adela) is nonbinary, but only realized as such after talking with a nonbinary party member; they were referred to here with feminine pronouns due to identifying as female at the time this oneshot takes place.


	3. School of Invention

Objectively speaking, there was absolutely no reason to bother harvesting her parent's broken plating for this project. None. She could have simply requisitioned some scrap metal from the duodrone in charge of waste collection for this Cog; it would hardly have complained. The scrap metal existed to be used, after all, either for creating weapons or supplies or for creating more modrons, and forging herself an arcane focus certainly qualified as creating supplies.

Yet, some deeply irrational (and likely organic) part of her being wanted this particular supply to be special. Something unique, that only she had access to.

Once Patch left the Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus there was a considerable chance she wouldn't be able to come back. She might die. She might change. She might become something too chaotic to exist happily in the realm that had raised her. Anything was possible in the less-ordered planes. As such, she wanted the few items she allowed herself to bring with her when she left to be as evocative of her home as possible, so that at least some part of it would always be with her.

So she had asked her parent for a sliver of its time (and it huffed in the way it did when she'd said something amusing, though Patch had honestly not meant to make a joke) and collected some of the broken and worn plating it had accumulated in untold years of service, repairing what she could out of a sense of love and gratitude and requisitioning what she couldn't from one of the quadrones tending to the plane's various Inevitables. Her parent had asked her what she was planning on channeling her magic through, and she'd told them her plans: not a wand or a rod or a crystal but a pocket watch, an orderly symbol of her home and her heritage that it would be her duty to maintain, even far away in the material planes, just as it was her duty now to assist in maintaining order in the Cogs.

Her parent had approved. It had approved heartily, in fact, even going so far as to offer her one of the gears that fed into its vital systems, the closest thing to a symbolic heart that it possessed, to serve among the watch's components.

Patch had gotten five minutes into a panicked lecture that such a thing would both kill her parent and be highly impractical from a technical standpoint before realizing her parent was making those huffs again and had likely been telling a joke of its own.

Sometimes it frustrated her that her parent was the one more in tune with organic nuance out of the two of them, despite Patch herself being the only one with any actual organic components. She supposed that was the crux of the reason why she'd been planning to journey into the prime material planes anyways.

It took effort to work out a time with which she could requisition the forges for this project. There was always something that needed to be made in Mechanus: spears, gears, arrowheads, washers, winguts, bolts, _modrons_... The forges were always busy, and attending the needs of the plane would always be more important than attending the whims of an individual.

Patch brought a number of molds into the forge with her to cast the metal as it reached the perfect temperature, one for each piece she'd need to create, so she could save time by letting everything set all at once instead of in batches. There were a multitude of parts to make and only so much time to make them all before the forge would be needed for the next order of tools. She would have to be quick, and she would have to be precise. Expediency and efficiency were the key.

Then again, this was the Nirvana. Such virtues were always key in every day functionality.

By the time everything had been melted and poured, Patch found herself distinctly at ease with a craftsman's satisfaction flowing through her as she gazed upon her work.

Her clockwork would need time to cool and time to set before it could be worked again, and each of the golden components would need to be engraved and polished before they could be set in place together. She would need to requisition oil, and carving tools, and sufficient enough time outside of her daily labors to attune herself to her creation and get used to channeling magic through it. Such things might take months or weeks to acquire. Oil was too valuable to waste so flagrantly on aesthetic polishing, and time was the single most important resource to be found on the Cogs.

But Patch wasn't particularly bothered by such a timescale.

She might've made up her mind to leave Mechanus one day and explore the strange worlds lying beyond it made of dirt and grass, but that didn't mean she was raring to go as soon as possible. There was still work to be done and plans to be drafted and supplies to be requisitioned. She would need to learn to speak the common tongues. She would need to learn how to interact with the organic people that formed the other half of her heritage. She would need to learn how to live each day with only her own judgement to guide her rather than the overriding will of a god, or the One and the Prime.

She would need to do so many things, Patch would be amazed if she was descending the Celestial Staircase into the material planes within the next year. And patch was completely fine with that outcome.

She'd made up her mind to leave, but objectively speaking, there was absolutely no reason she couldn't take her time in doing so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Patch Javelin is a Mechanatrix (whose 5e race I cannot link to because it's a personal homebrew, but they're from the 3.5 Fiend Folio) wizard from the [School of Invention](http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/wizard:invention), a very fun subclass whose features I completely failed to utilize when I played them because it was just a oneshot and I was very careful about what spells I had prepared.
> 
> Patch's parent is a quarut by the way! These things are great, they're in charge of keeping time and space from getting fucked up.


End file.
